Pity poor Rudolph Cassella. He fell through a crack big enough for anyone to see from miles off when he died Jan. 9 in a house fire.

"Rudy," 66, was living in a human warehouse. Though he had schizophrenia, he wasn't living in a nursing home or even a licensed personal care home. His bedroom, described as slightly larger than a picnic table, was one of 11 in an oft-remodeled rural house in Bushkill called Keystone Residential Services. Besides the house, Keystone owns an adjacent small row of apartments.

Despite the name, the owners presented themselves as ordinary landlords who occasionally did errands and other favors for their tenants. They weren't attentive enough, though, to call Rudy's closest relative, his sister in Utah, when he died. It took a caseworker with Carbon-Monroe-Pike Mental Health Mental Retardation services to do that.

Basically, no one was looking out for Rudy. Not the Department of Public Welfare's Bureau of Human Services Licensing, whose officials determined that Keystone Residential Services' house was not operating as a "group home" that the Welfare Department would regulate. Not township officials, despite the 11 unrelated adults living together under one roof, or the fact that some of them, like Rudy, were smokers. There was no smoke alarm in Rudy's room.

All 11 occupants of this house had special needs. Rudy received $1,800 a month in Social Security. Of that, he forked over $550 in monthly rent for his tiny room. His canceled checks showed he actually paid the landlords closer to $800 a month, the amount over the rent apparently compensating them for picking up his mail or filling his prescriptions.

It's all legal. And it's not new. In 2002, state welfare officials interviewed more than a dozen Keystone apartment residents after receiving complaints about the owners "warehousing" elderly clients. Officials found a few infractions and fined the owners $500, but returned the fine after the problems were corrected.

Rudy's family tried several times to get him to move out, but he didn't want to. Despite his own disability, he considered himself, family members said, "a caretaker" of the other residents. That role was a far cry from his earlier career as a highly paid Wall Street computer programmer. Eventually his drinking and his mental illness caught up with him. His smoking may even have caused the fatal fire, but the extensive damage led the fire marshal to list it as undetermined.

Every society has a share of down-and-out citizens, who are unable to care for themselves and who sometimes become victims of accident, predators or their own actions. These people are especially vulnerable when they don't live near family members or fall off their family's and friends' radar. If, like Rudy, they're not in a licensed facility, sometimes no one keeps track of them. When even government doesn't oversee their basic safety and care, disaster can strike. Rudy Cassella considered himself a caretaker, but there was no one to protect him.